Artificial Intelligence
Course Learning Outcomes
At the end of this course:
 Knowledge and understanding
You should have a knowledge and understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial
Intelligence including Search, Game Playing, KBS (including Uncertainty), Planning
and Machine Learning.
 Intellectual skills
You should be able to use this knowledge and understanding of appropriate
principles and guidelines to synthesise solutions to tasks in AI and to critically
evaluate alternatives.
 Practical skills
You should be able to use a well known declarative language (Prolog) and to
construct simple AI systems.
 Transferable Skills
You should be able to solve problems and evaluate outcomes and alternatives
Attendance
You are expected to attend all the lectures. The lecture notes (see below) cover all the topics
in the course, but these notes are concise, and do not contain much in the way of
discussion, motivation or examples. The lectures will consist of slides (Powerpoint ),
spoken material, and additional examples given on the blackboard. In order to
understand the subject and the reasons for studying the material, you will need to attend
the lectures and take notes to supplement lecture slides. This is your responsibility. If
there is anything you do not understand during the lectures, then ask, either during or
after the lecture. If the lectures are covering the material too quickly, then say so. If there
is anything you do not understand in the slides, then ask.
In addition you are expected to supplement the lecture material by reading around the
subject; particularly the course text.
Must use text book and references.
Areas of AI and Some Dependencies
Search
Logic
Machine
Learning
NLP
Vision
Knowledge
Representation
Planning
Robotics
Expert
Systems
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
 making computers that think?
 the automation of activities we associate with human thinking, like
decision making, learning ... ?
 the art of creating machines that perform functions that require
intelligence when performed by people ?
 the study of mental faculties through the use of computational models ?
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
 the study of computations that make it possible to perceive, reason
and act ?
 a field of study that seeks to explain and emulate intelligent
behaviour in terms of computational processes ?
 a branch of computer science that is concerned with the
automation of intelligent behaviour ?
 anything in Computing Science that we don't yet know how to do
properly ? (!)
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
THOUGHT
Systems that thinkSystems that think
like humans
rationally
Systems that act
BEHAVIOUR
like humans
HUMAN
Systems that act
rationally
RATIONAL
Systems that act like humans:
Turing Test
 “The art of creating machines that perform functions that
require intelligence when performed by people.” (Kurzweil)
 “The study of how to make computers do things at which, at
the moment, people are better.” (Rich and Knight)
Systems that act like humans
?
 You enter a room which has a computer terminal.You
have a fixed period of time to type what you want into
the terminal, and study the replies. At the other end of
the line is either a human being or a computer system.
 If it is a computer system, and at the end of the period
you cannot reliably determine whether it is a system or
a human, then the system is deemed to be intelligent.
Systems that act like humans
 The Turing Test approach
 a human questioner cannot tell if
 there is a computer or a human answering his question, via teletype
(remote communication)
 The computer must behave intelligently
 Intelligent behavior
 to achieve human-level performance in all cognitive tasks
Systems that act like humans
 These cognitive tasks include:
 Natural language processing
 for communication with human
 Knowledge representation
 to store information effectively & efficiently
 Automated reasoning
 to retrieve & answer questions using the stored information
 Machine learning
 to adapt to new circumstances
The total Turing Test
 Includes two more issues:
 Computer vision
 to perceive objects (seeing)
 Robotics
 to move objects (acting)
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
THOUGHT
Systems that thinkSystems that think
like humans
rationally
Systems that act
BEHAVIOUR
like humans
HUMAN
Systems that act
rationally
RATIONAL
Systems that think like humans:
cognitive modeling
 Humans as observed from ‘inside’
 How do we know how humans think?
 Introspection vs. psychological experiments
 Cognitive Science
 “The exciting new effort to make computers think …
machines with minds in the full and literal sense”
(Haugeland)
 “[The automation of] activities that we associate with
human thinking, activities such as decision-making,
problem solving, learning …” (Bellman)
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
THOUGHT
Systems that thinkSystems that think
like humans
rationally
Systems that act
BEHAVIOUR
like humans
HUMAN
Systems that act
rationally
RATIONAL
Systems that think ‘rationally’
"laws of thought"
 Humans are not always ‘rational’
 Rational - defined in terms of logic?
 Logic can’t express everything (e.g. uncertainty)
 Logical approach is often not feasible in terms of
computation time (needs ‘guidance’)
 “The study of mental facilities through the use of
computational models” (Charniak and McDermott)
 “The study of the computations that make it possible to
perceive, reason, and act” (Winston)
What is Artificial Intelligence ?
THOUGHT
Systems that thinkSystems that think
like humans
rationally
Systems that act
BEHAVIOUR
like humans
HUMAN
Systems that act
rationally
RATIONAL
Systems that act rationally:
“Rational agent”
 Rational behavior: doing the right thing
 The right thing: that which is expected to maximize goal
achievement, given the available information
 Giving answers to questions is ‘acting’.
 I don't care whether a system:
 replicates human thought processes
 makes the same decisions as humans
 uses purely logical reasoning
Systems that act rationally
 Logic  only part of a rational agent, not all of
rationality
 Sometimes logic cannot reason a correct conclusion
 At that time, some specific (in domain) human knowledge or
information is used
 Thus, it covers more generally different situations of
problems
 Compensate the incorrectly reasoned conclusion
Systems that act rationally
 Study AI as rational agent –
2 advantages:
 It is more general than using logic only
 Because: LOGIC + Domain knowledge
 It allows extension of the approach with more scientific
methodologies
Rational agents
 An agent is an entity that perceives and acts
 This course is about designing rational agents
 Abstractly, an agent is a function from percept histories to actions:

[f: P*  A]
 For any given class of environments and tasks, we seek the agent
(or class of agents) with the best performance
 Caveat: computational limitations make perfect rationality
unachievable
  design best program for given machine resources

 Artificial
 Produced by human art or effort, rather than originating
naturally.
 Intelligence
 is the ability to acquire knowledge and use it" [Pigford
and Baur]
 So AI was defined as:
 AI is the study of ideas that enable computers to be intelligent.
 AI is the part of computer science concerned with design of
computer systems that exhibit human intelligence(From the
Concise Oxford Dictionary)
From the above two definitions, we can see that AI has two
major roles:
 Study the intelligent part concerned with humans.
 Represent those actions using computers.
Goals of AI
 To make computers more useful by letting them take over
dangerous or tedious tasks from human
 Understand principles of human intelligence
The Foundation of AI
 Philosophy
 At that time, the study of human intelligence began with no
formal expression
 Initiate the idea of mind as a machine and its internal operations
The Foundation of AI
 Mathematics formalizes the three main area of AI: computation,
logic, and probability
 Computation leads to analysis of the problems that can be
computed
 complexity theory
 Probability contributes the “degree of belief ” to handle uncertainty
in AI
 Decision theory combines probability theory and utility theory (bias)
The Foundation of AI
 Psychology
 How do humans think and act?
 The study of human reasoning and acting
 Provides reasoning models for AI
 Strengthen the ideas
 humans and other animals can be considered as information processing
machines
The Foundation of AI
 Computer Engineering
 How to build an efficient computer?
 Provides the artifact that makes AI application possible
 The power of computer makes computation of large and
difficult problems more easily
 AI has also contributed its own work to computer science,
including: time-sharing, the linked list data type, OOP, etc.
The Foundation of AI
 Control theory and Cybernetics
 How can artifacts operate under their own control?
 The artifacts adjust their actions
 To do better for the environment over time
 Based on an objective function and feedback from the environment
 Not limited only to linear systems but also other problems
 as language, vision, and planning, etc.
The Foundation of AI
 Linguistics
 For understanding natural languages
 different approaches has been adopted from the linguistic work
 Formal languages
 Syntactic and semantic analysis
 Knowledge representation
The main topics in AI
Artificial intelligence can be considered under a number of headings:
 Search (includes Game Playing).
 Representing Knowledge and Reasoning with it.
 Planning.
 Learning.
 Natural language processing.
 Expert Systems.
 Interacting with the Environment
(e.g. Vision, Speech recognition, Robotics)
We won’t have time in this course to consider all of these.
Some Advantages of Artificial
Intelligence
 more powerful and more useful computers
 new and improved interfaces
 solving new problems
 better handling of information
 relieves information overload
 conversion of information into knowledge
The Disadvantages
 increased costs
 difficulty with software development - slow and expensive
 few experienced programmers
 few practical products have reached the market as yet.
Search
 Search is the fundamental technique of AI.
 Possible answers, decisions or courses of action are structured into an abstract
space, which we then search.
 Search is either "blind" or “uninformed":
 blind
 we move through the space without worrying about what is coming next, but
recognising the answer if we see it
 informed
 we guess what is ahead, and use that information to decide where to look
next.
 We may want to search for the first answer that satisfies our goal, or we may want
to keep searching until we find the best answer.
Knowledge Representation & Reasoning
 The second most important concept in AI
 If we are going to act rationally in our environment, then we must have some way of
describing that environment and drawing inferences from that representation.
 how do we describe what we know about the world ?
 how do we describe it concisely ?
 how do we describe it so that we can get hold of the right piece of knowledge
when we need it ?
 how do we generate new pieces of knowledge ?
 how do we deal with uncertain knowledge ?
Knowledge
Declarative
Procedural
• Declarative knowledge deals with factoid questions
(what is the capital of India? Etc.)
• Procedural knowledge deals with “How”
• Procedural knowledge can be embedded in
declarative knowledge
Planning
Given a set of goals, construct a sequence of actions that achieves those goals:
 often very large search space
 but most parts of the world are independent of most other parts
 often start with goals and connect them to actions
 no necessary connection between order of planning and order of execution
 what happens if the world changes as we execute the plan and/or our
actions don’t produce the expected results?
Learning
 If a system is going to act truly appropriately, then it must be
able to change its actions in the light of experience:
 how do we generate new facts from old ?
 how do we generate new concepts ?
 how do we learn to distinguish different situations
in new environments ?
Interacting with the Environment
 In order to enable intelligent behaviour, we will have to
interact with our environment.
 Properly intelligent systems may be expected to:
 accept sensory input
 vision, sound, …
 interact with humans
 understand language, recognise speech,
generate text, speech and graphics, …
 modify the environment
 robotics
History of AI
 AI has a long history
 Ancient Greece
 Aristotle
 Historical Figures Contributed
 Ramon Lull
 Al Khowarazmi
 Leonardo da Vinci
 David Hume
 George Boole
 Charles Babbage
 John von Neuman
 As old as electronic computers themselves (c1940)
The ‘von Neuman’ Architecture
History of AI
 Origins
 The Dartmouth conference: 1956
 John McCarthy (Stanford)
 Marvin Minsky (MIT)
 Herbert Simon (CMU)
 Allen Newell (CMU)
 Arthur Samuel (IBM)
 The Turing Test (1950)
 “Machines who Think”
 By Pamela McCorckindale
Periods in AI
 Early period - 1950’s & 60’s
 Game playing
 brute force (calculate your way out)
 Theorem proving
 symbol manipulation
 Biological models
 neural nets
 Symbolic application period - 70’s
 Early expert systems, use of knowledge
 Commercial period - 80’s
 boom in knowledge/ rule bases
Periods in AI cont’d
 ? period - 90’s and New Millenium
 Real-world applications, modelling, better evidence, use of
theory, ......?
 Topics: data mining, formal models, GA’s, fuzzy logic,
agents, neural nets, autonomous systems
 Applications





visual recognition of traffic
medical diagnosis
directory enquiries
power plant control
automatic cars
Fashions in AI
Progress goes in stages, following funding booms and crises: Some examples:
1. Machine translation of languages
1950’s to 1966 - Syntactic translators
1966 - all US funding cancelled
1980 - commercial translators available
2. Neural Networks
1943 - first AI work by McCulloch & Pitts
1950’s & 60’s - Minsky’s book on “Perceptrons” stops nearly all work on nets
1986 - rediscovery of solutions leads to massive growth in neural nets research
The UK had its own funding freeze in 1973 when the Lighthill report reduced AI work severely Lesson: Don’t claim too much for your discipline!!!!
Look for similar stop/go effects in fields like genetic algorithms and evolutionary computing. This is a
very active modern area dating back to the work of Friedberg in 1958.
Symbolic and Sub-symbolic AI
 Symbolic AI is concerned with describing and manipulating our
knowledge of the world as explicit symbols, where these symbols
have clear relationships to entities in the real world.
 Sub-symbolic AI (e.g. neural-nets) is more concerned with
obtaining the correct response to an input stimulus without
‘looking inside the box’ to see if parts of the mechanism can be
associated with discrete real world objects.
 This course is concerned with symbolic AI.
AI Applications
 Autonomous Planning &
Scheduling:
 Autonomous rovers.
AI Applications
 Autonomous Planning & Scheduling:
 Telescope scheduling
AI Applications
 Autonomous Planning & Scheduling:
 Analysis of data:
AI Applications
 Medicine:
 Image guided surgery
AI Applications
 Medicine:
 Image analysis and enhancement
AI Applications
 Transportation:
 Autonomous
vehicle control:
AI Applications
 Transportation:
 Pedestrian detection:
AI Applications
Games:
AI Applications
 Games:
AI Applications
 Robotic toys:
AI Applications
Other application areas:
 Bioinformatics:
 Gene expression data analysis
 Prediction of protein structure
 Text classification, document sorting:
 Web pages, e-mails
 Articles in the news
 Video, image classification
 Music composition, picture drawing
 Natural Language Processing .
 Perception.
Homework
Read Pg (1 – 31) From the book